Monthly Archives: November 2007

Safari 3

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Last week, Apple has released the new version of their browser Safari to all operating systems – Safari 3 final version was included into the 0s X 10.4.11 update for Tiger users, and Safari 3.04 for Windows users. It was quite an important update remembering that a couple of weeks ago, with the release of the Leopard, Apple has launched the 3rd version of Safari for the OS X users who has upgraded their system. The new Safari has brought some restyling to the user interface – now it has the unified look and feel of the Leopard operating System. Also it finally includes (after 4 years of waiting) the possibility of styling the form controls with a css. This is a major improvement for GUI development, i believe every web developer went nuts with Safari, because of not being to style the controls.

This is a major upgrade for all systems. On windows a new beta version is much faster then the previous version. Not only the so called “cold start” but also the navigation, loading times and all the rest appears to be quite faster then before.

The list of the recent improvements to WebKit – on which Safari is based is quite impressive – it includes stability and speed improvements, improvements to the Enhanced Rich Text Editing: it includes TinyMCE and FCKEditor (think visual editors for Drupal and WordPress), SVG (after Opera and Firefox one more player coming to this market, IE team – are you still sleeping ?), XPath and XML improvements (think XMLHttpRequest and Ajax).

OS X safari version include some development tools, which must be enabled by hand (do they continue to be in alpha stage?)

There are some bugs though to work on the Windows version – thats why it is still a beta, i believe. I have managed to see Safari loosing its look and feel and some of the windows control buttons appearing (quite an unpleasant change).

Apple is taking quite serious this Safari offensive, and if they will spend just a little more time implementing Web Developer tools and stabilizing the Windows version, i believe the time when some users will start switching to Safari.

Dino Consult

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A couple of days ago i have put online a new site for “Dino Consult“, that was developed on Drupal. The design is very simplistic, to accompany the visit card that the owner of Dino Consult has. It was also based on the schematic design that was created by the client. Dino Consult is by their description a “consultancy firm for the export of innovative technologies, process comparisons and project management”.

Besides creating a xhtml/css template I have used the following modules: Views, Google Sitemaps, Update Status, TinyMCE (i still argue that it or any other editor should make into the core of the Drupal), PathAuto, Meta Tags, i18n and IMCE.
Basically the Views were used to place together. I still cannot imagine more or less complicated site or even a normal one (like Dino Consult) without Views module, it simply can do so many things for you.

The new GIMP

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The brand new version of the GIMP is already available on www.gimp.org. It seems that i was a kind of sleeping for the last month or so, since i completely missed this so much awaited and needed release. The 2.4 Version has been released on the 24th of October bringing all the changes that were made during the last couple of years by the GIMP developers. The most important of them for me are:

  • Scalable brushes – one can finally scale brushes while editing the photos, it has been a pain doing it without this feature
  • Selection resizing – you will wonder how have you lived all this years without it
  • Foreground select tool – yes yes yes !! no more suffering watching Photoshop users doing it on a instant basis
  • New crop tool – no more “keyboarding” for a simple operations

One thing i am very excited to see if the GIMP developers has managed to improve the color handling – in a lot of situations it was quite disastrous in the previous versions (2.2), but hey i am so grateful for having the Gimp that i am not whining, really =O)

The only missing thing at this moment is the absence of the MAC OS X port of the GIMP 2.4 version. The latest release available is still the 3rd release candidate. If you are an open source user and you are doing some visual stuff from time to time then you do not wish to miss this release.